We introduce a technique for creating novel, enhanced
thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine
the advantages of plain thumbnails and text summaries
to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks.
We conducted a study in which participants used three
different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails,
plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web
pages to find several different types of information. Participants
took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to
find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails,
and text summaries, respectively. As expected,
there was a strong effect of question category. For some
questions, text summaries outperformed plain thumbnails,
while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed
text summaries. Enhanced thumbnails (which
combine the features of text summaries and plain
thumbnails) had more consistent performance than either
text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all
categories the best performance or performance that
was statistically indistinguishable from the best.